Your best holiday(s).

I'm not really well travelled, nor do I travel particularly well, so I rarely venture outside Yorkshire these days. Not that I'm complaining; I love the place, and I prefer to get to know a few places really intimately than to pack a novel place into a week or two which flies past so quickly that I barely take any of it in. I'm just as happy finding unique little worlds in the leaf litter at the bottom of my garden, to be quite honest; or as I used to do, exploring caves and potholes; in their own way, far more remote than anywhere in the world that you could get a jet plane to.

My best, and most adventurous, holiday was back-packing in the Orkney Islands when I was in my twenties. I went on my own, and camped wild most nights, taking about a month to visit all of the accessible islands. The coastlines are absolutely magnificent in places, and the amount of wildlife that I saw was astonishing. Lovely people too; when I knocked on a farm door to ask permission to put my tent in a nice spot, the usual reaction was bafflement at why I'd even bother asking - I even got left a couple of eggs left outside my tent for breakfast at one spot!

Best of all were the neolithic and Viking archaeological sites. Nearly every island has a few, and some islands have dozens. In a single day, you could see a couple of stone circles, two or three neolithic chambered tombs, a Viking round tower (broch), and an incredibly well preserved neolithic village. When I was there, all but a handful of the biggest sites had any amenities - no acres of car parks, gift shops, security fences, etc. Most just had just a little fence around them to keep the sheep out, and you could easily have one all to yourself and explore it to your heart's content. It's once of the most concentrated areas of well preserved sites like that in Europe, and yet was so peaceful the whole time I was there.

Even the weather was good to me; mostly sunny, and with only three days of rain while I was there (it made up in intensity for what it lacked in frequency, though - the sky is like a power shower that only has on and off settings!)

I'm not really well travelled, nor do I travel particularly well, so I rarely venture outside Yorkshire these days. Not that I'm complaining; I love the place, and I prefer to get to know a few places really intimately than to pack a novel place into a week or two which flies past so quickly that I barely take any of it in. I'm just as happy finding unique little worlds in the leaf litter at the bottom of my garden, to be quite honest; or as I used to do, exploring caves and potholes; in their own way, far more remote than anywhere in the world that you could get a jet plane to.

My best, and most adventurous, holiday was back-packing in the Orkney Islands when I was in my twenties. I went on my own, and camped wild most nights, taking about a month to visit all of the accessible islands. The coastlines are absolutely magnificent in places, and the amount of wildlife that I saw was astonishing. Lovely people too; when I knocked on a farm door to ask permission to put my tent in a nice spot, the usual reaction was bafflement at why I'd even bother asking - I even got left a couple of eggs left outside my tent for breakfast at one spot!

Best of all were the neolithic and Viking archaeological sites. Nearly every island has a few, and some islands have dozens. In a single day, you could see a couple of stone circles, two or three neolithic chambered tombs, a Viking round tower (broch), and an incredibly well preserved neolithic village. When I was there, all but a handful of the biggest sites had any amenities - no acres of car parks, gift shops, security fences, etc. Most just had just a little fence around them to keep the sheep out, and you could easily have one all to yourself and explore it to your heart's content. It's once of the most concentrated areas of well preserved sites like that in Europe, and yet was so peaceful the whole time I was there.

Even the weather was good to me; mostly sunny, and with only three days of rain while I was there (it made up in intensity for what it lacked in frequency, though - the sky is like a power shower that only has on and off settings!)